Louise Bonnet’s large-scale paintings depict spectacular, Surrealist-tinged visions in which distended, grotesque bodies take center stage. Figures with engorged limbs, teeny heads, conical breasts, and curled appendages hover on the spectrum between the saintly and the animalistic. Influenced by horror movies, underground comics, feminist sculpture, and religious art, Bonnet’s works engage with issues of exertion and sexuality, pleasure and restraint. The painter, who is in her early fifties, is a relative rarity in the world of fine art: after working quietly in her studio for years without major recognition, she began achieving substantial critical and commercial success just in the past half decade. Recently, she has shown her work at the 2022 Venice Biennale and at the Hong Kong outpost of Gagosian gallery, by which she is represented, and she is now exhibiting a suite of new paintings at Gagosian in New York. In these works, she continues her preoccupation with the tumescent naked body on display—at once an object in a vanitas arrangement and a subject stretching toward full personhood.
Bonnet was born in Geneva, and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband—the ceramist Adam Silverman—and their two children. I first met Bonnet last spring, when I interviewed her at the Metrograph theatre, on the Lower East Side, before a screening of David Cronenberg’s 1979 film “The Brood,” which she selected as part of a series of her favorite body-horror movies. This past August, I visited her at her studio in Rhode Island, where she and Silverman spend the summers, and where she was preparing for her upcoming Gagosian show. We spoke about Los Angeles and freedom, what it feels like to be a woman, how to banish one’s judgmental inner voice as a painter, and the body as a site of complication. The transcript of our conversation has been edited and condensed.
You grew up in Geneva in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. What was that like?
I was quite sheltered culturally. My parents listened to almost only classical music, there was no TV, we almost never went to see movies. Even restaurants, I realize, we didn’t go to. My stepdad, who raised me, was an economist. He had a schedule that was all about control, and my mom, who was a homemaker, went along with it. He ate the same thing every day. Every night, he would put half a dry fig and a small piece of bread under a glass, and that was his breakfast. And he went to eat lunch at the same spot every day and had the same thing. So it was very self-denying. I wasn’t exposed to popular culture at all, so I drew and read all the time, because that was the only entertainment I had. We lived in the suburbs, so you couldn’t even go out and walk around and see people. It was pretty isolating and very boring.
What kinds of artistic influences slipped through the cracks anyway and meant something to you as a young person?
My stepdad had these books about medieval art, where you had images of, like, people being pushed off a cliff by demons, and that was so terrifying to me as a child, I could barely look at it. And his mother, my grandmother, was super Catholic. My mother was Jewish, and so my grandmother wanted to be sure I didn’t turn out too Jewish, and, when we’d go to visit her in the south of Switzerland, there was this little church that we’d walk to from her house, with faded plastic flowers and the saints with the blood and the Stations of the Cross, and that imagery really sunk into me.
When I was a teen, I started getting into comics more, like Robert Crumb, and really dirty French stuff like Charlie Hebdo. Because I grew up without much cultural context, I took these things at face value. Even though I was aware of feminism, I didn’t really read certain things as sexist. For instance, I loved the cartoonist Tex Avery, and he had this one cartoon of cars in which all the bad drivers were depicted as women. Clearly this sort of thing imprints on you, and it’s lame. But what was inspiring to me about it was the imagination. It was sort of like Disney on mushrooms. You don’t always have to think, This is right and this is wrong. It taught me that you can draw anything you want. You can draw a huge woman covered in hair, or whatever.
As a young person, I was also completely clueless about sex. There was never any sex in the movies or TV shows I did see, so I had no visual idea of what bodies do together, so I remember drawing some sex scenes, trying to figure out how things would work, and also getting excited by it, which was confusing, because no one had told me it was supposed to be pleasurable. No one admitted the fact that sex feels good.
Did you go to art school?
I didn’t have any models of any people who were fine artists. I was, like, Who gets to be an artist? I knew I had to be able to get a job. So, for college, I went to study illustration and graphic design at the École des Arts Décoratifs [now called the Haute École d’Art et de Design], in Geneva. It took me some time to realize that I’m just bad at it. It was basically the opposite of what I do now. It was all lines, very flat, no oils, and I could feel there was something missing. I did encounter stuff for the first time, like [the artist] Tom of Finland, who I liked because he seemed like he paid a lot of attention to something that was completely trivial. So this guy was drawing something trashy or risqué, something to jerk off to, but he spent days making it perfect and I was, like, Wow. I really liked that. Basically paying attention to the wrong thing. Not the wrong thing, but not, like, Jesus Christ.
